Friday, February 29, 2008

Bullshit is a shape shifter. If it won’t fit into one mold, you simply reshape it until it fits another.

Pundits penned obituaries of your Operation Iran Makeover when the NIE said Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program back in 2003.

They should have known better.

Now comes our Director of National Intelligence Mike ”There’s a terrorist in every woodpile” McConnell with his Annual Threat Assessment. (What a creative title for a report! It tells us there will always be threats to assess whether or not there are any threats because the very act of assessment presumes the presence of threats that need assessment thus insuring that the very act of assessment will create threats to be assessed.)

And threats we do have, and they all spell I-r-a-n. Mike tells us they are two-fold: uranium and missiles. Iran is getting them both and this means world peace is at risk, so it may become America’s patriotic duty to preserve world peace by nuking the bastards.

It is a simple formula: “uranium plus missiles equals the end of our safety.” Mike understands that policy is spun out of threads of infantile causality that make it easy for an unlettered public to digest. Mike drives the point home when he says, “We do not know if these [nuclear weapons] activities have been restarted.” Innuendo rocks! That’s kind of like saying, “We do not know if Dick Cheney has regained his sanity.”

You are equally brilliant in your creative use of rhetoric. In a 2006 speech you brought your audience to its feed when you boldly proclaimed, “America will not bow to tyrants.” (No doubt, you were looking in the mirror, but that’s another story. ) However, the cherry atop the whipped cream was when you spoke of “tools of mass murder”, a phrase that is a virtuoso song and dance. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was too damn dry. Mass murder congers up memories of the holocaust that Ahmadinejad denies.

The beauty of war is that its cause has nothing to do with reality. Fantasy has produced some of the world’s juiciest wars. The English Civil War that brought Oliver Cromwell to power was fought over such earth-shaking issues as whether the bread and wine would be on the altar or to the left of the altar during Holy Communion, or whether the clergy would wear surplices over their cassocks.

You may not realize it, George, but I am a seer. Whenever I suck on the sacred pipe, the future parades before my zoned-out eyes. Here is what is to going to happen:

If HillBill is the Democratic nominee, you’ll do nothing while the Republican attack machine drives her into a corner in which she must all but promise to attack Iran. It’s a no-brainer since AIPAC has her in its back pocket. If bamaobama is the nominee, you attack Iran, declare a national emergency, impose martial law and cancel the election.

Isn’t life wonderful when a plan comes together? Never have so many defense contractors owed so much to so few madmen. Operation Iran Makeover is alive and well. The flames of fear burn brightly as the sun slowly sets on the toxic fog of what remains of world peace.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Polish up another Medal of Freedom. This time, the recipient will be M. Sliwa Public Relations, that patriotic organization that exposed bamaobama’s terrorist ties. It’s true, George. Bamaobama actually served on the board of an organization that donated money to an Arab group that is opposed to Israel and supports immigration reforms such as providing healthcare and education for illegal immigrants.

The firm is flaking a story by Aaron Klein of Web News Daily (WND), that hard-hitting news organization that recently spotlighted a respected psychiatrist who contends that liberalism is a mental disorder in the best tradition of the now defunct Soviet Union’s practice of declaring dissidents mentally unbalanced.

Here we are seeing cinematic journalism at its best. Like the cinema, this brand of journalism understands that truth puts people to sleep. Cinematic journalism is a PR creation that would rather stimulate than inform.

Sliwa’s bamaobama piece is the greatest example of cinematic journalism since the PR firm of Hills & Knowlton scammed America into Gulf War I when they penned the heart-breaking tale of Iraqi soldiers storming the neonatal clinic at the al-Addan hospital in Kuwait City where they threw the preemies on the floor to die and shipped the incubators back to Iraq.

Surely you remember the tragic testimony of Nurse Nayirah before Congress who sobbed as she described the atrocity. (Okay, so after the war it turned out “Nurse Nayirah” was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and that Hills & Knowlton had coached her before her testimony, even down to telling her when in her testimony she should start weeping. In cinematic journalism, a story is true if it accomplishes its mission. Truth has nothing to do with its content.)

Cinematic journalism, like the real cinema, relies on illusions and special effects. It is thriving because media consolidation and cost cutting have left the media so understaffed that it runs stories, like the bamaobama expose, without any fact checking.

Let us laud M. Sliwa Inc. for their heroic efforts to keep America safe from intelligent and articulate presidential candidates. We are a nation of frat boys, not of statesmen.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Ben Bernanke is a keeper. He understands just how the bullshit is sliced. On February 14, he gave our oligarchy a Valentine Day’s present when he told the Senate Banking Committee, “Money center banks and other large financial institutions have come under significant pressure to take onto their own balance sheets the assets of some of the off-balance-sheet investment vehicles they had sponsored.”

This is one of those innocuous statements that say volumes by appearing to say little. Implicit in his statement is an expression of horror that the banks might be forced to wallow in the garbage they created. It all gets down to a question of responsibility. In America, responsibility is a virtue we take much pride in. However, it is a personal virtue and not a corporate one.

“Personal responsibility” is the mantra that allows financial institutions to do nothing as foreclosures increase. A homeowner is personally responsible for signing on to a loan he didn’t understand. The bank is not responsible for issuing it.

Corporate “responsibility” is counterproductive. To hold corporations responsible for their actions would be to inhibit the innovations and creativity that allows our corporations to profit from the disasters they create.

Capitalism’s genius is to turn its inherent ineptitude into a revenue stream. As the economic meltdown continues to grow, new sources of capital are being generated by selling off hunks of America to Middle East private equity funds. This is globalization at its finest. Its ultimate act will be the sale of the United States to an Arab sheik. Then, and only then, will capital finally shed the nation-state that has for too long been an millstone around its neck.

This is why we need even more deregulation. A regulated capitalism is incapable of creating the financial meltdowns that allow for the heavenly ascension of capital into the ether of moral turpitude.

With Ben at the helm, we can be sure that corporate incompetence will continue to flourish.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

You have replaced Liberty’s torch with a newer and more efficient model. The American public now basks in the glow of a Corporate Democracy that reflects the transition of your office from president to CEO. In doing so, you have streamlined the entire process.

Our oligarchy has long understood that political freedom and efficiency are mutually exclusive. Under your guidance, efficiency has moved into the corner office and political freedom is now an exiled beggar shaking his tin cup for whatever pittance the public may chose to drop in it.

No more will the gears of government be clogged with messy disputes between the three branches of government. Gone are the days when a recalcitrant Congress could deadlock the country. We now have a Congress that bows and pulls on its forelock every time you enter the room.

Elections are more streamlined now that they are no longer cluttered by interminable debates over issues. Rather, campaigns focus on defining their opponents in as negative terms as possible through the creative use of sound bites lasting no longer than 7.8 seconds (down from 42.3 seconds in 1968).

I know your minions are planning to “define” bamaobama as not ready to be our commander in chief because in the throes of your Eternal War of the Empty Policy, commander in chief is the only quality a CEO needs since it doesn’t require much reading. America needs a commander in chief who is a clown strutting the boards in an oversized uniform bedecked with medals fashioned out of tinfoil. Bamaobama is simply too honest for such a role.

For that matter, bamaobama is too damn honest to be an effective CEO. The problem is that he is clinging to the outmoded definition of truth as a representation of reality. You’ve changed all that. Truth now lies in the title of the speaker and not in the content of the statement. The office makes the truth, which is why your every statement is true by virtue of the fact that you are our CEO/commander in chief, no matter how false the statement because the statement can’t be false because you said it. Thanks to you, Papal Infallibility has gone secular.

All of this is possible because the American public can no longer tell the difference between focusing and zoning out. The intellect is now an endangered species since it is equated with the indiscriminate accumulation of disparate facts and statistics with no attempt made to synthesize them into a new perspective. Instead of seeing a naked emperor, Americans sit passively in front of their televisions while breathless newscasters describe the emperor’s costume down to the minutest detail.

But the best thing about being a CEO is that no matter how badly you fuck up, you are still rewarded. Texas is going to build a library in your honor, an empty mausoleum that will preserve a record of your accomplishments that will elude future historians. The advance for your memoirs will run to eight figures and it will be all true because you wrote it.

Thanks to you, America is no longer occupied by citizens but by non-unionized employees. She is no longer the land of the free but has become another store in the Wal-Mart chain where employees learn the invigorating sport of grubbing for a living.

The new truth is that you cannot have wealth without poverty. After all, wealth is the result of an upwardly mobile capital that is sucked from the pockets of the poor and deposited in the pockets of the rich. This is why America is still The Land of Opportunity.

Monday, February 25, 2008

I take such pleasure in the social regression your administration has set into motion. It is a walk down memory lane as you bring back those golden days of yore when a man knew his place in life’s pecking order and there was none of the uncertainty and doubt that accompanies social mobility. If a man died in the dung heap into which he’d been born, there was no shame attached to it, no sense of dishonor for failing to climb the economic ladder and achieve success through hard work and ass kissing. If you were born poor, you died poor.

And you are bringing it all back.

What is especially heartwarming is how you have made indebtedness an instrument of social control as it was in the golden age of commerce. Debt kept the sharecropper on the land and the worker in the factory.

Sharecropping sang in those days with its forward and its settle. The plantation owner gave the sharecropper a mule, a plow and seed (the forward), with the understanding that the debt would be repaid (the settle) when the crops were harvested. It was the birth of creative bookkeeping as the owner cooked the books so the sharecropper never paid off the debt. Debt slavery replaced physical slavery, and the sharecropper was as tied to the plantation as the slave had been.

The mining and timber industries quickly picked up the beat with their company towns and company stores. The bookkeeping was just as creative in the company store where books continued to be cooked, and if a man became disgusted with working sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week and tried to leave, the owners got the sheriff after him for nonpayment of debt.

Now the banks have replaced the plantation owner and the manufacturer as the America’s debtmeisters. Instead of cooking the books, the credit card companies keep the mob in hock through usurious APRs and backbreaking fees. As factories close and as workers are forced further down the economic ladder, it is chains of plastic that keep them in the workplace, willing to accept shit jobs that pay shit wages. This plastic slavery is aided and abetted by the shrinking availability of health care that forces the proles to max out their cards whenever illness strikes.

Might I suggest that you borrow a page from your Latin American cronies? In many of those countries, debt is inherited when a peon croaks. It’s really democratic when you think about. If the rich can will their wealth to their children, why shouldn’t the working poor have the same privilege and be able to will their indebtedness to their children. Very often it is the children of the poor who start agitating for social justice. Why not nip this in the bud by having the children born into debt poverty?

In truth, inherited debt would make little difference. What the credit card started, the mortgage will finish. The poor bastards will never get out of hock and America will be blessed with a pool of labor that is as surplus as it is impoverished.

Thanks to you the happy songs of the oppressed will once again echo through the land as minstrels sing of happily indigent workers leading simple lives of simple faith while the system crushes them in preparation for their ascent into a heavenly paradise.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

One of our more visionary presidents was William Howard Taft. Looking at the Western Hemisphere, he foresaw the day when three American flags would define the extent of our influence and control: one at the North Pole, one in Panama and one in the South Pole. Then he added that, “by virtue of our superiority of race, it is already ours morally.”[1]

You say the same about the world, and you have the defense budget to back that up.

Five Hundred and fifteen billion in defense spending will reinforce a hell of a lot of racial superiority. And that doesn’t even cover our moral ownership of Iraq and Afghanistan. When you throw in our off-book expenditures, we are looking at a trillion dollar defense budget.

Much of this money is going to develop new and advanced weapon systems that would have been useful during the Cold War. Someask why these expenditures are necessary, since the Cold War has been over for some time.

Not!

Surely, people don’t think our Military-Industrial-Security Complex would let a cash cow like that die a natural death.

Michael Klare says, “If you look at the new budget which came out just this week, it calls for vast spending on new weapons systems that can only be reasonably justified by what they call a ‘peer competitor’, a future superpower that could threaten the United States. Only China conceivably can fit that bill. Not Iran, Not Iraq, or some [other] rogue state. Only China fits that bill.”

If there is one thing Corporatism can’t abide, it is the competition that is the scourge of the free enterprise system. This is why corporatists over the last century have been doing everything in their power to eliminate it. If shady dealing won’t work, we can always nuke the competition.

As always, it’s about the oil stupid! Klare go on to say, “The Pentagon and US strategists talk openly about US-China competition for energy in Africa, in the Caspian Sea basin, and in the Persian Gulf, and they talk about the danger of a China-Russia alliance that the US has to be able to counter. This is very much part of US concerns. They talk about the Shanghai Co-operation Organization as a proto-military alliance that threatens America’s vital interests.” (Our alliances, of course, are not a problem since they are products of our racial superiority.)

Therein is the beauty of resource wars. We are prepared to burn millions of barrels of oil to protect the world’s shrinking oil supply, justifying even more military expenditures so we can burn even more oil to protect less oil. Burning all this oil will require even more sophisticated weapons systems that burn even more oil to protect the oil that is rapidly disappearing because we have to burn so much oil to save the oil.

Truly, leadership is genius.

I see the day, George, when a blood-stained American flag will droop from every flagpole in the world. It will be a golden age when the oligarchies of the world have united beneath the stars and stripes so they may cower in their fortified vaults, counting their few remaining barrels of oil while angry mobs, brandishing pitchforks and torches, riot in the streets.

What makes this doubly delicious is that the financial brains at Moody's are threatening to cut our credit rating because we're spending so much on Social Security and Medicare. Doesn't that just set your serotonin to bubbling?

Saturday, February 23, 2008

An iron rage is squeezing my balls! How much longer must America suffer the slings and arrows of dissident radicals spewing their subversive prose across the breadth and width of the internet? Why doesn’t the Senate act? On October 23, over four-hundred patriots in the House of Representatives passed HR 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorist Act that will add thought control to the arsenal of weapons in our fight against gay Muslim abortionists. I am happy to report that the tally included 219 craven Democrats

Sadly, the Senate version, S 1959 is languishing in that chamber. We need action, George, and we need it now! now! now! You’ve got to hold some feet to the fire!

The importance of the bill struck me when I came across this rebellious piece by Sara Robinson. O, the terror of it! The nerve or her suggesting that when a people’s freedoms are pissed on, when their prosperity is threatened, when they are exploited and oppressed, when their leaders are Bozos, when the poor do their part to make the rich richer, when thinking is discouraged, when the country is bankrupt and when its bankers are scam artists, a people will revolt.

This is why that bill is so crucial. You have pissed off enough people across a broad enough spectrum of society that in the absence of this bill you could very well have a revolt on your hands. And in the eyes of the Corporatist State, revolt, no matter how peaceful, is a subset of terrorism. And in such a revolt, all our revolutionaries would surely be homegrown. This could well hinder your efforts to transition America to corporate democracy which is a commercial transaction in which the public trades its political freedoms for the freedom to consume.

Believe me, George, had you been running the show in eighteenth-century British North America when Tom Paine published his Common Sense, the man would have been rendered before the ink was even dry!

Our way of life is on the line! What we need now are leaders who are firm of eye and scowled of brow spinning their fantasies of realpolitik that bring out the basest emotions of our people. What we need now is the immediate passage of S 1959.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Isn’t it wonderful to have a lock on life, to have all your ducks in a row? Surely, the cronification of America is a wonder to behold. Bit by bit you and your minions have seeped your cronies into every nook and cranny of our government until it has morphed into a well-oiled machine that is sensitive to your every nuance (whenever you have a nuance, which isn’t very often, but who really cares.) What Boss Tweed did for New York City, you have done for America.

The keystone to this structure, of course, is your cronified Supreme Court. They surely delivered another one for you when the ruled that manufactures of medical equipment were immune from liability for personal injury as long as the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved the device.

The decision makes sense because we know, George, as surely as there is a God in heaven, this is the best equipment money can buy, given the constraints of productivity, efficiency and cost containment. And it is indeed a comfort to have this equipment approved by an agency that understands the constraints of productivity, efficiency and cost containment. The decision illustrated the importance of having party hacks on the court who also understand the constraints of productivity, efficiency and cost containment.

But the decision did more than prohibit the victims of cost-contained equipment from suing the manufacturers. It also established the supremacy of federal standards over state standards. Unfortunately, the business-friendly policies of your administration have run afoul of states still plagued by the demon of public responsibility. All too often they have promulgated standards stricter than federal standards. It is the responsibility of our federalized cronies to save the states from the errors of their ways.

I was pleased to see that you are slipping another case through the courts that would grant immunity to big Pharma as long as the FDA approved the drug that resulted in death and debilitation. It is time the American people learned to accept risk as a fact of life. The courts exist to insure the smooth flow of commerce and not to act as the public’s nanny.

Surely it is a Confederation of Cronies that makes America what she is today.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Democracy’s greatest challenge is the proper control of the public. The mob is so unstable; they fail to understand all the nuances of power so they keep looking for things like fair play and decency. They actually expect their leaders to personify the neighborly values of Main Street USA.

Little do they understand that this can never be. This is why the public is such an impediment to a healthy democracy. All the State cares about is the amassing of power and capital. This is the beauty of our one-party system; it is adept at manipulating the nuts and bolts of this amassment.

The Republican bloc of the party is untouched by the idealism of the mob since it eschewed idealism decades ago. The Democratic bloc, on the other hand, is periodically plagued by it. This is why, after the debilitating idealism of the Carter administration, the bloc created the “super delegate” as bulwark against these outbursts of idealism and decency.

With great wisdom, the Democratic bloc chose party hacks to be their super delegates. These are people who well understand the importance of protecting the status quo against these periodic attacks of probity and decency. Normally these delegates lurk in the shadowy back rooms of the nominating convention. A raised eyebrow can end a presidential bid; a nod of the head can secure a nomination. This is democracy at its finest.

However, with the ascension of bamaobama, the public spotlight is suddenly on the super delegates. This is not a healthy situation. Just as a bright light can kill certain virulent strains of bacteria, so can publicity hamstring the proper functioning of the super delegates. Now there is talk of HillBill stealing the convention by buying off these delegates. It is essential that she do so, but her success would be certain to agitate the mob and we might see a repeat of the 1968 convention.

Get in touch with the overlords of your State-run media and tell them to start spiking stories about Hillbill’s efforts of purchase as many super delegates as she can. Democracy only works when the illusion of democracy is maintained.

All of this is such a farce, anyway. One of the delusions of a democracy is the belief that a president actually runs the country. The French are the realists when they tell us, “l 'argent n`a pas de maître” (money has no master).[1] But, what the hell, it helps the ratings and does its part to maintain the daydream that we are a free country

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

You are a charitable and giving man, always on the lookout for ways to elevate the downtrodden and the marginalized. Those whom society holds in contempt you clutch to your bosom in an act of protective love that is so characteristic of you and your administration.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in your elevation of the Chickenhawk to a position of honor and glory. How their fortunes have changed. I remember well the days when “Chickenhawk” described the male pedophiles that clustered in the subterranean dankness of the NYC’s 42nd Street subway station looking for young boys to bugger.

How you changed that, George. You lifted them out of the musty depths of the subway and placed them in heaven where they sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty from whence they shall come to judge it the maimed and the dead.

I mean, my God, why go to the trouble of buggering a boy when you can shred him with shrapnel. Sexual exploitation does nothing for America; martial exploitation does much.

Just as the man who has known neither male nor female loves the boy, so does the man who has never been shot at love war. It is this mindset that has proven so valuable to your administration. They are an essential component of your policy of eternal warfare because their every decision serves the promotion and continuation of conflict.

Look at how they have dealt with Pakistan. The Pakistani electorate resoundingly defeated our man Pervez Musharraf in what many see as a repudiation of your policies in the Middle East. Does this stop your Chickenhawks? Hell, no! They celebrate Musarraf’s defeat by dropping a couple of Hellfire missiles on some mud huts in the village of Mir Ali in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), thus pissing off the Pakistanis who have forbidden any American offensives on Pakistani soil.

Supposedly, they were wiping out an al-Qaeda leader. In truth, I suspect they were making a point: popular will does not influence policy.

How wonderful it is that your Chickenhawks have exchanged the darkness of the subway station for the well-lit corridors of power. The beautiful thing is that despite their elevation, they continue to prey on the young.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The coup is completed. The revolution Ronnie set into motion is victorious. America is remade into a new and dynamic image that makes the psychopathological behavior of the State the new norm.

The triumph of the revolution did not announce itself in a final battle nor in the humiliating capitulation of the enemy. Instead, it announced itself in a quiet observation that barely merited any notice in the Mainstream Media.

The surrender came from the lips of John “Let’s-Impeach-Them-After-They-Leave-Office” Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It came during a discussion of impeachment with two members of Code Pink, a group that is having its own detention center constructed somewhere in fly-over land.

Conyers told the group that he is reluctant to begin impeachment proceedings because the “corporate power structure” would not allow impeachment without unleashing some serious “blowback.”

Is that a turn-on or is that a turn-on? Here you are, shredding the Constitution, breaking the law with impunity and committing war crime after war crime, and Congress won’t impeach your ass because its corporate masters won’t allow it. (Don’t you just love the amorality of his concern?)

It has finally happened! America is no longer a republic, she is a corporation. We are now a government of the shareholders, by the shareholders and for the shareholders. From now on, whenever we say “The State” we mean “The Corporation.”

What an accomplishment! You established a rogue administration that effectively divorced itself from all that America has stood for in the past, and while the public consumed itself into indebtedness, you snuffed the “beacon on the hill” and turned the State into the dark force so necessary to remain competitive in a global economy.

At the same time you redefined “public”. No longer does public refer to the unwashed Mob that has always been a threat to the established order. Now public and the State, as defined by you, are one in the same. Public education now means State education, education in the service of the State. Where public education once sought to breakdown class distinctions, State education reinforces them.

The State now defines America through a State-run media that convinces the public that a cancerous State means that we are all carriers of tumors and that treatment is carried out through the metastasizing of these tumors.

Individuals who fail to meet State specification are marginalized through diagnosis. To the healthy State, a failure to conform is prima facie evidence of a mental disorder, and the State’s pharmacy is well stocked with drugs to treat the disorder. (Were it not for drugs, I would not love you as I do.)

Somewhere in heaven, Ronnie is smiling in approval. He promised us “morning in America” and you are the sun breaking out over the barren landscape that is now the State. History will prostrate herself before your greatness. No longer will you have to worry that your legacy would be an orange jumpsuit.

O pioneer! You have led us into the wilderness and we have made it ours. We have climbed to the mountaintop and found the black void that is our home. We have discovered the numbness that is the only serenity and we thank you for leading us to it.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Organized religion has but one goal, and that is the death of the soul through the remission of sins. The soul’s death gives the ego room to expand, and it is the ascension of the ego that gives our elite the fragmented and isolated public that is so much easier to manipulate and control. The greatest danger our elite faces is the merger of a fragmented public into a viable community of souls.

“Soul”, contrary to popular belief, is not strictly a religious term. When the soul is ascendant, individual consciousness expands beyond the ego and becomes aware of how tightly life is integrated and interdependent. This is why it is so dangerous. The soul sees a naked emperor; the ego thinks he is a fashion statement. The soul is the font of individual freedom, while freedom frightens the ego.

Broken communities of egos facilitate the growth of capital. The greater the fragmentation, the greater is the potential for exploitation and the greater is the potential for economic expansion. Economic expansion is based on deception. (Sure, you can afford that six-figure mortgage!) The ego thrives on deception while the soul finds it an abomination.

The church pioneered the death of the soul by promulgating the fiction that Jesus died for our sins. This reduced the soul to a pathetic, sin-soaked turd badly in need of redemption, and the church quickly discovered that an profitable path of redemption lay in the slaughter of heretics and infidels.

Today’s corporatists owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Pope Urban II. It was on November 17, 1095, at Clermont, in central France, that remission through slaughter was born, thus making possible the capitalist empire as we know it today.

No Christian doctrine of holy war existed before Clermont. …Urban’s sermon at Clermont was the definitive moment when the Church “preached the cross” taking the initiative in calling for war, defining its scope and purpose, and offering those who took part the rewards of heaven. The concept was brave, spiritual, and flawed. The Crusades were not Christian in any general sense, but specifically Catholic and European. Within a few years the killing—“coercion” was the technical term used—of non-Catholic heretics as well as nonbelieving Moslems was enshrined in the canon law of the Western Church.

And the beat goes on as American Protestantism has donned the mantle of traditional European Catholicism. Now, instead of “following the cross,” we follow the spreadsheet.

A viable community of souls has no reason to go to war other than in defense of its territory. A throng of isolated egos need war because war is the only activity that gives them a bogus sense of unity. And war, as we all know, is one hell of a revenue stream.

Slaughter is the real reason American is a Christian nation. Peace simply makes possible the cancerous growth of a secular humanism that saps the martial spirit and endangers our prosperity. The self-indulgent ego must take precedence over the giving soul if America is to stay hegemon to the world. Carnage is life; compassion is death.

It is the primary goal of your office to supply a constant stream of heretics and infidels badly in need of conversion through the military arm of the Washington Consensus. We are still a nation of missionaries. The only difference is that the doctrine we bring to the unwashed in that of St. Milton of Friedman, not that of Jesus of Nazareth.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

It’s been a great twenty-eight year financial orgy. The bubbly flowed and the living was high. Virtual money created virtual bubble after virtual bubble. No sooner did one pop then a flood of funny money inflated another.

Alas, nothing is forever. It’s time for you and your cronies to start opening some Swiss bank accounts and scoring some one-way tickets to Brazil ‘cause the bullshit is about to hit the fan. Our twenty-eight year run of growth fueled by asset price inflation and rising indebtedness is over, and there ain’t no more bubbles to inflate.

This is what happens when finance is divorced from reality. It was great while it lasted. Your cronies managed to keep wages flat while increasing productivity. Look at what they accomplished. The minimum wage is currently $5.85. Had it kept pace with productivity increases, it would be $18 an hour. That’s $12.15 per hour, per worker you cronies have been able to pocket. This is just one way that capital is siphoned upwards.

Not only were our financial geniuses able to divorce wages from productivity, but they embraced large trade deficits, wallowed in rising debt-to-income rations, shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, and encouraged assorted bubbles.

All the while they concealed the effect of flat wages on the American worker by encouraging him to go deeper and deeper into debt. They inflated housing prices, thus enabling Mr. and Mrs. America to think they were doing well by tapping into their home equity.

Now, it is all coming apart. The country is broke, the average citizen is broke. Your cronies are over leveraged and are seeing their assets shrink. Ever since we went off the gold standard, we have managed to scam the world into believing the dollar was a viable reserve currency. The only thing backing it up was hot air and bullshit. The biggest favor ever done for your cronies was when the dollar was converted from a representative currency that could be redeemed for gold to a fiat currency based on the delusion that its value will remain stable. This enabled the United States to amass real debt using Monopoly™ money.

I assume your cronies are also busy converting their cash assets into gold or some other precious metal. This is why the price of gold has soared past the nine-hundred dollar mark. True, it’s a little hard to pay for a vacation villa in gold bars, but I’m sure the Swiss would be more than happy to convert their gold into Euros.

But, before they pack their suitcases and make one last call to their brokers, I hope your cronies will pause to utter a prayer of gratitude for the Fed. By keeping interest rates so low for so long the Fed encouraged a “chase for yield” that made the credit worthiness of borrowers an anachronism. The only requirement for a loan was the ability to fog a mirror.

Thank God capital is no respecter of national boundaries. Like a toxic cloud it floats over the face of the earth, creating deserts in its wake. It will never come to rest in its addiction to growth. Wherever there is a spirit to crush or a resource to exploit, there you will find capital.

I wish your cronies well in their next endeavor. I have faith that they will find another bubble to inflate as they continue their quixotic quest for the stainless-steel bubble that will never pop.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Greatness is not for those with clarity of vision, for greatness requires a marked talent for self deception. Greatness has nothing to do with great acts and everything to do with great illusions.

We claim that our freedoms and liberties define our greatness as a nation. In truth, a fetid bubble of corporatist elitists defines our greatness. Our greatness is the craft with which our elite behave as if they are our greatness and paint their crimes as virtues. The illusion of greatness goes to the demographic with the best flacks, but not just PR flacks. Greatness needs academic flacks, political flacks and media flacks, all busily creating the smoke and mirrors that maintain greatness’s illusion.

Great men are hollow shells, their greatness the products of hair stylists, tailors and shoeshine boys. The costume is all, just as the empty rhetoric is all. Greatness seeks neither immortality nor a place in history, though it may pay lip service to both. Greatness cares only for booty and spoils. To extort and appropriate is the hallmark of greatness; the slaughter of its inferiors is its ultimate trip.

Greatness cares not about the grand vision, but about the day's profits, and its brow is never troubled by the misery the extraction of these profits create. Greatness eschews petty crimes for the grand larceny that brings with it the immortality of the moment. Its spoils go not to build or heal, but to indulge and pamper. Why spend millions creating jobs when the money can build mansions and vacation villas. Why feed the poor when the money can buy a fleet of private jets. Why sink wells in Africa when the money can pay for lavish parties. Why earn approval when one can buy it.

It is all theater. To act great is to be great while flacks sing paeans to the greatness that isn’t.

Your greatness, George, is that you are to statesmanship what Britney Spears is to pop music. The only difference is that you have better flacks to shield your madness from the public.

Friday, February 15, 2008

We live in exciting times! New ages are breaking out faster than farts at a baked-bean cook off. There is the New Age of Financialized Ruin, the New Age of Preemptive Peace and the New Age of Free-Market Impoverishment.

Now we are seeing the emergence of another one: the New Age of Progressive Bigotry.

Happy is the nation grounded in bigotry. This is a nation that revels in the stasis of certainty, a certainty that is a bulwark against the trauma of growth and maturity. Bigotry is a Fountain of Youth, and those who drink deeply of it never change.

Life has not been easy for bigotry. Starting with the end of World War II and continuing on through the trauma the civil rights movement, bigotry was forced into the closet. That is changing. Thanks to your Global War on Terror, bigotry can finally come out and stand before the world in all of its liberated glory.

This New Age has given us something new, something bigotry never had: its own manifesto. I am speaking of a document titled, Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership, issued by a throng of ex-NATO commanders. It sings from its opening paragraph which reassures us that, “What the Western allies face is a long, sustained and proactive defense of their societies and way life. …International terrorism today aims to disrupt and destroy our societies, our economies and our way of life. …What they have in common is an assault on the values of the West.” (Granted, western values gave us the holocaust and Hiroshima; but, hell, nobody’s perfect.)

I ask you, George, have you ever seen a more eloquent way of repositioning bigotry’s traditional threat that “they” are going to rape our women and marry our sisters?

Among the dangers the document outlines is that of Demography. It warns us that, “Population growth and change across the globe will swiftly change the world we knew. The challenge this poses for welfare, good governance and energy security…is vast.” There you have it; the world’s skin is getting browner and we have to act.

The document goes on to warn us that, “There is also the more philosophic problem of the rise of the irrational—the discounting of the rational. Though seemingly abstract, this problem is demonstrated in deeply practical ways. [These include] the decline of respect for logical argument and evidence, a drift away from science in a civilization that is deeply technological. The ultimate example is the rise of religious fundamentalism, which, as political fanaticism, presents itself as the only source of certainty.”

And, hell, that’s only the United States. It’s even worse in the Arab world!

Not to worry, the good generals have our backs covered. Their response to this threat is both far reaching and visionary. The solution is nothing short of “escalation dominance, the use of a full bag of both carrots and sticks—and indeed all instruments of soft and hard power, ranging from diplomatic protest to nuclear weapons. (Emphasis mine)

Doesn’t that just give your follicles a hard on? General Jack Ripper is back and kicking ass. We whisper a protest while we’re nuking them! That’s diplomacy at work protecting our freedoms.

What we are talking about is the greatest lynching the world has ever seen. But instead of nooses, we’ll be using nukes. (When lynching was a way of life in the South, it was a practice to sell souvenir postcards with photographs of the victims. Would not souvenir postcards of irridated babies and toddlers be a potential revenue stream? We always did say the Middle East would finance its own liberation.)

It is good to know that our military leaders are hard at work protecting the purity of our bodily fluids. It is high time we scrubbed clean the face of the earth, and the B61-11 nuclear bunker buster will be our mop.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

It's time to hit the panic button! America is going through one of those periodic spasms of idealism that shake up the status quo. If we are not careful, it will be the Sixties all over again. You had a nice little game plan in place, and it is starting to unravel. There is a danger we could have a real election in 2008

It was all so simple. Here is your party, demoralized and fragmented, the barrenness of its ideology exposed for all to see. The religious right wants nothing to do with McCain. Your endorsement is seen by many Republicans as the kiss of death. This is why the party needed Hill-Bill as the Democratic nominee. Only she could unite Republicans and sweep McCain to victory.

Instead, we have bamaobama crisscrossing the country with his “Kumbayah” bullshit, and the public is lapping it up. How dare he speak of unity and hope when you and Hill-Bill have put so much effort into divisiveness and despair?

This is dangerous, George! Creatures of the night have been running this country for twenty-plus years, and creatures of the night cringe before the dawn. The light of day is anathema to them. When the cock crows, when the songbird begins its song, they scurry back to their dank crypts, but not before they shoot the cock and throttle the songbird.

Here we have bamaobama calling forth the dawn, and the sophisticated sneers from the moral cripples in the media are falling on deaf ears.

The man actually believes in the democratic process and wants to return debate and discussion to the arena. Doesn’t he realize that debate requires critical thinking and that critical thought could bring down the entire military-security-complex once the public realize that it is nothing more than a vestigial remnant of the Cold War whose sole function is to enrich your cronies?

What’s even worse is that the public is actually voting in the primaries. Decades of nonelections driven by public apathy are threatened by bamaobama’s sunshine.

Thank God you have an arsenal with which to drive back the dawn. There is Section 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that allows you to invoke martial law. To facilitate that, you have created the Northern Command (Northcom) which gives the military operational command in the United States for the first time since the Civil War. The military has come up with fifteen scenarios that would justify a declaration of martial law. (I wonder if a viable candidate is one of them.)

Then there is the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that allows you to disappear just about anyone you want to. Nor must we forget the National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD-51) that allows you to insure the continuity of government is the event of a self-proclaimed “catastrophic emergency”.

Finally, we have the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR 1955). Your insects in the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 404-6.

It is indeed a comfort to know that Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) is busily building detention camps all over the country to be ready in the event of a national emergency such as an outbreak of democracy. I don’t mean to put a bug in your ear, George, but remember that a common theme drives every terrorist: the hope for a better tomorrow. One could infer that even speaking of hope, and meaning it, is an act of latent terrorism.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

One of the joys of being a right-wing stoner is an expanded vision. The Right wanders the dark side, but no matter how thick the darkness, the stoner sees all and rejoices in all. The stoner sees what a slut language is, how willing she is to perform for the highest bidder, how quickly she can change lingerie to suit her customers. Whatever the fetish, she is up to it.

Language works best when she dogpaddles nude through the black bile of bigotry and odium, when she can demonize and tear down. She is well suited to our dark age for she sings her songs of death and destruction in a voice thick with blood.

Slowly, she is birthing a new song. It is a song, like many of her songs that make holy that which was once evil; her magic is to give darkness the appearance of light.

Her new song sings of the bomb as an instrument of creation.

For it is a truism, George, that whatsoever we destroy we must reconstruct, after a manner. This is why the bomb gives our lives meaning because it makes of us builders of the new and better, after a manner. Must not an old building be demolished before a new and better building can be built? Bombing simply accomplishes in minutes what it might take a demolition crew weeks to accomplish.

If Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for war and a time for peace, then it follows that there is a time for destruction and a time to award cost-plus reconstruction contracts.

What you describe as the “defining struggle of our time”[1] is our struggle to find something to destroy so we can contract out its reconstruction.

And as always, the first bars of a new song issue forth from the miasmic basements of the Beltway. Your Department of State is looking towards a future fraught with opportunities for new creations. So they created the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization.[2] It seems they weren’t too happy with the reconstruction of Iraq. The operating assumption of shock and awe was that the Iraqis would be so shocked and awed they wouldn’t mind if foreign contractors, using foreign labor, came in a rebuilt the place while unemployed Iraqis starved.

They did.

Never again, George! This new office has drawn up plans to reconstruct twenty-five countries after we destroy them, even though we haven’t even begun the demonization process. Citizens of these countries can sleep well knowing that even before we level their homeland we will have awarded the cost-plus contracts to reconstruct them.

A cost-benefit analysis of bombing confirms that it is a zero-sum enterprise. The loss a devastated country suffers is offset by the income American private enterprise derives from rebuilding it. Bombing is a sound economic practice.

Americans desensitized by seven years of warfare, torture, black holes and eroded civil liberties, will be easily convinced that bombing is a creative force. It is a vehicle of economic growth as it creates new jobs and pumps public money into the private sector. The income generated by bombing justifies our bloated defense establishment. Without it, we would have nothing to reconstruct, and that would surely dull the creative edge that is bringing the third world into the twenty-first century, one bomb at a time.

Your admirer,Belacqua Jones

[1] State of the Union, 2007[2] Naomi Kline. The Shock Doctrine, page 380.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Just as the sight of crocuses peaking through the soiled snows of March are harbingers of spring, so is the dealing of the Terror Card the harbinger of another election cycle. Once again, you are trotting out the strategy that has kept you in office for so long: If you scare the chickens enough, they will vote for the fox.

It is a thing of beauty. First you create imaginary shadows, and then in every imaginary shadow you hide an imaginary terrorist skulking down Main Street America, ready to blow up the local soda shoppe where America’s clean-cut teenagers hang out.

Your Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell says it so, so it must be so. And we must believe it is so, and our faith must be perfect, untainted by doubt, because if our faith is not perfect and it we allow the 935 lies that led up to your Iraq enterprise plant to a seed of doubt in our minds, we may wonder if the next utterance that comes out of your administration’s collective mouth might not be lie number 936.

National Security demands perfect faith. Just as the Rapture shall come; so are droves of terrorists rowing across the Atlantic in route to Main Street.

Mike tells us it is so.

When he appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Feb. 5, he said, al-Qaeda was refining “the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.” They are training westerners, Mike tells us. No doubt, they are home-grown terrorists recruited on the Web which is why the Web must be constantly monitored by NSA and why anyone wishing to use the Web must submit to a background check before being licensed to do so.

Mike said it, so it must be so.

Mike’s truisms underscore why it is so important that you have unlimited authority to plant surveillance cameras in every girl’s locker room in the country without any pesky judicial oversight. His truisms also underscore why we must go beyond water boarding, which is simply a variant of recreational swimming, and introduce the rack and the Spanish Boot. (Nothing loosens a terrorist’s tongue like the snap, crackle and pop of the bones in his feet being crushed.)

Of course, this means the CIA must have the administrative leeway to extract information from terrorists any old way it wants. Mike told the committee in no uncertain terms that if they didn’t authorize harsh tactics for the CIA, its agents simply would refuse to torture suspects and our national security would be breached.

Mikes testimony is the hot air that is inflating Sen. John McCain’s bid for the presidency. And it is giving John a real high. Already he has labeled the war on “Islamic” militants the key ideological struggle of this era.

The beauty of all this bullshit is that if anyone questions it, your minions accuse them of being “soft on terrorism” an accusation that has Democrats pissing their pants. And of course, the Democrats are so cowed they would never dare accuse you of spouting lies number 936, 937, 938, 939…∞.

Monday, February 11, 2008

…soaring stoned amongst the stars, awash in the black void of my being, caring-not-feeling-not, a demigod among the demigods of the divine imperium, scattering foil-wrapped bonbons of fire upon the poor and the downtrodden of the earth to lift them out of the black hole of their ignorance and send shards of body parts heavenward in the blinding light of transformation, whilst whispering platitudinous threats of reassurance to the unwashed as my serpent’s tongue flays the fecundity that is the very ground of very ground of chaos to render it sterile before the blank screen of the public eye…

Sunday, February 10, 2008

By God, sir, you are a warlock, standing over your bubbling cauldron of fetid brew as it spreads its foul miasma across the land, clogging the senses and disorienting the mind. You mumble the incantations that summon your demons from the Ninth Circle of Hell, broke free of the frozen waters of Cocytus. Your demons march in lock-step order behind you carrying high the blood-stained banners of War and Terror, banners dripping with the gore of women and children to the greater glory of our fair Republic.

There you stood proud and tall before the Conservative Political Action Committee[i] conjuring up your shopworn illusion of a “stark ideological choice at a time of war.” National Security is the magic word you hope will rally your base, and it will rally it will for “national” is but a code word for “corporate”. You and your minions well understand that you are not entering a presidential election, but are on a quest to win the Corporate Stamp of Approval.

How beautifully Mitt danced to your tune when he dropped out of the race, casting his own spell when he said he was quitting because he would not abet “the surrender to terror.”

But the shining moment of your speech, the moment that proved you were still capable of spreading the opaque net of illusion over the public’s eyes, was when you said, “This is an important election. Prosperity and peace hang in the balance.”

And well they do, sir, for should the Democrats take the White House there is a danger that both would return from their exile to the detriment of the corporate bottom line and the health of our Military-Industrial Complex.

No, George, you have the magic formula that has repositioned both peace and prosperity for the New American Century as you bomb the world into peace and bring us the prosperity for the few that can only come from the impoverishment of the many.

Stir your cauldron well, for its toxic brew must conjure up another four years of Republican rule, and dime-store magic is the only force that can make it happen.

Your admirer,Belacqua Jones

[i]“Bush presses for G.O.P. Unity; Party Set to Focus on Security.” The New York Times, Saturday, Feb. 9, 2008, Page A1.

Saturday, February 9, 2008

Hugo Chavez had it all wrong comparing you to the Devil. When he followed your appearance at the United Nations on September 20, 2006, he said he was following the Devil and that, “It smells of sulfur still today. “

My God, George, sulfur is so yesterday! What Hugo failed to understand is that the Devil’s been repositioned, he’s had an image makeover. Gone are the cloven feet, the horns, the tail, the pitchfork and the stench of sulfur.

You no longer meet the Devil in Hell or at a moonlit crossroads. Today, you meet him at the mall. He comes striding towards you dressed in his Dockers™, his penny loafers and a blue, oxford dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar. His face is open and smiling, and as he takes your hand, you look into his gentle eyes and feel your cares and worries fall away.

Evil has gone mainstream; it is now part of the mundane order of things. What once produced shock now produces a bored yawn.

I am going to dip into a little history, here, so try to stay awake. During the Spanish Civil War, a German air squadron dropped 100,000 pounds on the town of Guernica, killing 1,600 people. The world was appalled. It moved Picasso to create “Guernica”, a painting that stirred moral outrage in all who viewed it.

Fast forward 71 years and what do we find? Silence! On January 21st of this year, our Air Force dumped 100,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. Instead of journalistic outrage, the incident was buried in the twenty-sixth paragraph of a Los Angeles Times story.

The aerial bomb is the bread and wine of our New-Age sacrament. Its litany sanitizes and deodorizes evil. Instead of the cry of the savage, we now have the soothing drone of the official spokesman. Instead of blood and broken bodies, we have collateral damage. Aerial bombardments on civilian populations are simply strikes intended to “shape the battlefield” by “neutralizing any advantage the enemy could claim.”

Our bombs are smart bombs, we are told, precision instruments that zero in on their targets, as long as one ignores the theory of circle area probability that states only fifty percent of bombs dropped actually hit them. It’s the ones that miss that cull the herd.

Moral outrage is dead, George, and the world is a better place because of it. Though, I admit, sometimes it is a little too sanitized for my taste. I miss the good old days when Evil was a monster striding over the earth with blood and viscera dripping from his fangs. I miss the publicity it once generated; I miss the grainy black and white films of bodies being bulldozed into open trenches. But, this is the price we pay for dressing evil in respectability. It certainly makes your job much easier.

Someone should tell Chavez that the smell the Devil leaves in his wake isn’t sulfur, it’s Old Spice™.

Friday, February 8, 2008

Poor children can snack on lead paint chips in schools redolent of overflowing sewerage, and through the night ambulances can crisscross the streets of America’s great metropolises looking for emergency room that will accept a patient in cardiac arrest without health insurance, but if stocks go down, the panic buttons really get pushed, especially with a newsmedia so longing to report the stories that the critical upper-income demographic finds interesting and appealing.

The above is not a simple statement of fact; it is your victory dance. It is an acknowledgement that the force driving America is a series of arcane symbols and numbers dancing across the tickertape. It represents the ascendancy and final victory of the bean counter over our way of life.

Only with a rogue administration such as yours in office would this have been possible. By carrying forth the torch of deregulation, first lit by Ronnie, your administration has let loose the forces of financial anarchy that have driven the DJIA to new and dizzying heights.

You have created an atmosphere in which the American financial system was able to shed the bonds of fiduciary responsible and begin their adrenalin-pumping chase after fees for the sake of fees. To which Wall Street cried, “It’s about fucking time!”

I’m sure the hours you spent sleeping through your MBA classes brought home to you just how boring and inefficient fiduciary responsibility is. To wade through reams of paper and credit reports just to see if a borrower had a snowball chance in hell of repaying a loan wastes time and effort that could be spent chasing after another fee. The banks quickly learned that the way to boost their bottom line was to rubber stamp loans, bundle them, and ship them off to all the suckers waiting for them downstream.

For a generation raised on self indulgence and thrill seeking, fee chasing is an irresistible temptation. The thrill is so intense the practitioner becomes addicted to it even though, in his heart-of-hearts, he knows it is self- destructive behavior that will eventually blow up in his face.

In this respect, he is no different from the pathological liar who lives and thrives on the unbearable tension of being found out, and experiences a rush every time one of his multiple lies escapes detection. I’m sure your deep understanding of the liar’s psychological makeup has guided your hands off approach to the financial joy ride that has brought us to the precipice.

It all gets down to the elevation of private property over social responsibility. Granted, some wild-eyed leftist radicals might suggest that the ownership of corporate property is so diffuse that it is a misnomer to call it private property. But that does not change the fact that in America, private property is of more importance than human life and well-being. This is why drivers are quicker to yield to a fire truck than to an ambulance.

Meanwhile, our financial retards will continue to chase after fees like a mongrel dog sniffing after a bitch in heat. It is a heart-pumping way of doing business. The thrill is not so much in its success as it is in the erotic tension of wondering when it will all unravel.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

When it comes to the exercise of power, no force on the face of the earth can beat the pious mindset of the Euromericans. Given the deftness with which we wield power, there can be no doubt that we are a Christian nation. It is all a question of prioritizing. The faith teaches us that sexual licentiousness is a symptom of moral decay, while the ruthless exercise of power displays strength of character. The reason is quite simple: cum cream is ickier than blood.

Blood is poetry. It sings of race and of the Fatherland, the Motherland and the Homeland. It sings of the glory of slaughter, the thrill of rape and the exhilaration of pillage. Cum cream is simply a messy glob someone has to clean up.

It all boild down to a question of decency. The key is to completely identify decency with sexual propriety and totlally divorce it from society's treatment of "the least among you".

Power is only power as long as it clings to power. The problem with power is that it ages, and as it ages, it tends to lose its potency. This is why power must constantly reinvent itself and why the emphasis must shift from barbarity to technology and ideology.

Historically, the purest exercise of Euromerican power has been colonialism. Tragically, colonialism took a major hit at the close of World War II as indigenous people the world over, who witnessed the total destructiveness of the war, decided that the Whiteman must be a head case and started fighting for their independence.

This was about the time America emerged as a military and economic power. If there is one thing power hates, it is a challenge to its supremacy. After a nation has occupied the seat of power for a period of time, it becomes much like the aging whore who feels threatened by the young tarts working her beat. There is one significant difference: the only weapon an aging whore has is a blade with which to slash her young competitors. The powerful nation-state, on the other hand, has an entire arsenal of military and economic weapons at its disposal.

Our movers and shakers realized that the only way they would be able to cling to power was by repackaging colonialism. Thus was the Washington Consensus born. What a glorious con job that was. In the name of “free” trade and economic development we were able to hamstring the emerging economies of the Third World.

Emerging economies grow and prosper by protecting their infant industries through protectionist tariffs. The most efficient way to cripple an emerging economy is by forcing them to open their borders to every thief and pirate who is out to make a profit, and we Euromericans have cornered the market on theft and piracy.

This exploitation becomes increasingly important as the United States sinks into economic ruin. Maintaining one’s status as a superpower ain’t cheap. Just as old whores spend a fortune on anti-aging creams and makeup, so must the aging powerhouse spend a fortune on military hardware.

Not to worry, George, Euromerican ingenuity will save the day. As more countries come the recognize the Washington Consensus for the scam it is, our bean counters will simply redesign their strap-ons and come up with an even more creative way to shaft the brown skins.

Power’s roar will continue to echo off of the walls of our empty coffers for many generations to come. The wonderful thing is that when the system finally collapses, you and I will be long dead.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Something simply must be done! Over the past thirty years, America has slowly, but gradually, been forced back into a corporate mode of behavior with the reemergence of a compliant and disciplined workforce that remains compliant and disciplined no matter how badly the corporatist state abuses it.

Regrettably, one pool of anarchy, dissent and irresponsibility remains: the internet. And we all know that Corporatism tolerates neither anarchy, nor dissent nor irresponsibility.

It is a terrifying situation. America’s children are locked in their bedrooms, surfing the net and becoming increasingly radicalized as they are morphed into homegrown terrorists. And when they are not being radicalized, they are clicking onto porn sites where they are turned into perverted monsters. Before you know it, America will be overrun by sex-crazed Neomuslim terrorists who will rape everything they don’t blow up.

Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it. Thank God it’s all bullshit. It is simply my humble suggestion for a marketing campaign to purge the internet of its progressive sedition.

Our youth are not a problem. It is always the same whenever they get testy. They raise some hell, break a few windows, and then they get married, get a job, go into debt, and the next thing you know, they are voting Republican. No, George, homegrown terrorism is not an issue.

This does not mean the internet is home free. It presents a real and present danger, one underscored by your National Director of Intelligence, Mike McConnell who tells us that America’s banking system is at risk. McConnell points out that an internet attack on a single U.S. bank by 9/11-style terrorists would have a devastating effect on our nation’s economy. McConnell then trots out a shop-worn canard when he says, “My prediction is that we’re going to screw around until this something horrible happens.”

His solution is a bill that gives the government authority to spy, at will, on all e-mail, file transfers and Web searches.

McConnell proves what I have always suspected, that all of your administration’s bluster about armies of terrorists on the cusp of overrunning America is one of the greatest stand-up comedy routines the world has ever seen.

Take McConnell’s perceived threat to the American banking system.

George, George, George! The greatest threat to the American banking system is from the American banking system. Every time it gets a whiff of deregulation, it proceeds to devour itself. We saw this with the savings and loan debacle, and we are seeing it now with the subprime meltdown. It is a comfort to know that as the system self-destructs, McConnell will keep it safe from terrorists.

But what really amazes me is how you can still play the terrorists card after it has produced 935 lies just in the run-up to the Iraq enterprise. It just goes to show that a country without memory has no history by which to judge the present; so instead of growth, there is only the decay brought about by the benumbed repetition of habit.

I have no doubt that by the time you leave office, the internet will be in a state of total lockdown and the last pool of anarchy will be history, which nobody will remember. When this happens, a new dawn will break on our fair country, a dawn concealed by the viscous fog of oppression.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

The days remaining for your administration are dwindling down. You have much to do in a short period of time. So I thought I’d pass along a few inspiring words of wisdom just to give you a little boost as you turn into the home stretch.

· When church and state wed, the Devil pays for the reception because the child of theis death.

· God promised man no more floods. He said nothing about species extinction through anuclear holocaust or envionmental degradation.

· There is no law that says the next Messiah can’t be a cockroach.

· Fastidiousness is the midwife of oppression.

· The serene barbarity of the civilized drives empire.

· CEOs should not leave home without adult supervision.

· The White House is a sheltered workshop for arrested adolescents.

· Paranoia is America’s security blanket.

· Religious fervor peaks when the ego farts and the soul thinks the breath of the Spiritis upon it.

Etch them in stone, George. They will secure your place in history, if we survive to have one.[i]

Your admirer,Belacqua Jones

[i] All of these have appeared in previous blogs, but I’m feeling lazy this morning. --cw

Monday, February 4, 2008

My, my, isn’t it shaping up to be a real nail biter as we approach Super Tuesday and come closer to seeing which member of the Corporatist Party will be crowned as our next president. The Crony faction of the party has McCain and Romney butting heads while the Caver faction has Hill-Bill trying to out-Rove Rove in their bid to topple Obama.

Meanwhile, the pundits pund hot air while the media continues in their heroic effort to divert the public’s attention from the real issues facing the country.

The beauty of this whole project is that the media evaluates all of the candidates, regardless of which faction they belong to, on everything except their inherent ability to lead the country in a new directions. This is because the last thing any of them intend to do, if elected, it lead the country in anything that resembles a new direction. The entire electoral process has but one goal in mind, and that is to protect the status quo.

This is why the media is so important to the process. Three candidates presented a threat to the status quo: Edwards, Paul and Huckabee. The media effectively marginalized all three.

Of the four candidates still standing, none has even hinted that a major cause of the manifold problems facing America is our bloated defense establishment. Maintaining this white elephant is what has brought us to the brink of economic ruin. We are in hock to Asia so we can continue to develop weapon systems that are useless to fight the counterinsurgency wars we are facing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As soon as you were elected, you realized that the only way to keep the defense trough full was to ground our diplomacy on military might instead of statesmanship. Your efforts have made us the most reviled nation on earth, which means we need an even bigger defense establishment, which means even more defense contacts. This is what has kept congressional cavers cowed: the fear of losing the pork that is so essential if they expect to be reelected.

Edwards doomed himself when the characterized your Eternal War of the Empty Policy to be a “bumper sticker.” Your Eternal War is a corporatist hen that is farting golden egg after golden egg. You don’t make chicken soup out of hens like that.

And this, ultimately, is what the election is all about—keeping the hen healthy and well fed. All the talk about universal health care and restoring the middle class to its former glory is so much fluff meant to hide the primary goal of the Corporatist Party, and that is the shredding of the social safety net so its filaments can be used to build a comfortable nest for the hen.

No man or woman can ever hope to lead our great country unless they are prepared to bend over and kiss the hen’s ass. Politicians in the past had to acquire a tast for bootpolish; today's politicians must acquire a taste for chicken shit. Failure to do so is what doomed Edwards, Paul and Huckabee. All you are going to hear from the remaining candidates is a lot of lip-smacking.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

One of the time-honored methods of dealing with dissent has been to pathologize it. In the fifties, anyone who refused to blend into the grey political conformity the age demanded was dismissed as a neurotic.

Contrary to popular belief, the fifties didn’t invent the pathologization of dissent. It has a long and rich history. That eighteenth century genius Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, diagnosed anyone suffering from an “excess of the passion of liberty” as suffering from a mental disorder he called anarchia.

A major breakthrough in the diagnosis of dissent came in 1851 when a Louisiana physician diagnosed slaves who fled towards freedom in the north as suffering from drapetomania, while diagnosing those who didn’t squat and ask “What Color?” every time their masters said “Shit!” as suffering from dysaethesia aethiopis.

Throughout our history mental health has been defined as the willingness to submit to authority, and our physicians, psychiatrists and psychologists have been in the forefront of the battle to cure Americans of their dissent and unhappiness. Because let’s face it, George, dissent is unhappiness. A person rebels because they lack the tools to accept the subservient position the oligarchy has assigned them.

Unfortunately, this effort to create a happy, well-balanced society lacked one important component—a Big Pharma ready to push meds that could cure dissent in all of its manifold manifestations. There was no pill that could make a man lose his passion for liberty, no pill that would make the slave happy in his oppression, and no pill that would make him “snap-to” every time he heard his master’s voice.

Well, praise God, that has changed! Now we have pills for everything.

It has long been known that dissent begins with the young. We saw a tragic example in the rebellion of the sixties, which was largely student driven. Teenagers have long been associated with rebellion. Hollywood has glorified it in such movies as Rebel without a Cause; it has given rise to musical idioms from rock to rap. All of this was happening because we didn’t have the proper meds, and without the meds, we didn’t have the proper diagnosis, because we are now in an enlightened age of biological reductionism in which meds determine the diagnosis.

As always, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has come to our rescue. They have come up with a new diagnosis that pathologizes youthful rebellion. Now, instead of being a “rebel without a cause”, a young person is suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). They describe this disorder as a “pattern of negativistic, hostile and defiant behavior.” The beauty of this diagnosis is that a teenager doesn’t even have to break a law to have this diagnosis slapped on him.[i]

George, do you see the opportunity here? If we were to expand the diagnosis of ODD to include all the progressives who agitate for peace, justice, an end to poverty, universal health care and all that other shit progressives are always carrying on about, political oppression could be reduced to a process of writing prescriptions. Whenever AlterNet published one of its leftist screeds, we could dismiss the writer as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder. In this golden age of political medication, diagnosis would replace debate and discussion.

I can see it now, George, a brave new future devoid of long-haired acid heads pumping their subversive lyrices into the malleable brains of our children, an age when a well-adjusted Jon Stewart praises you to the heavens and acutually means it.

It looks as if Huxley was more of a prophet than he realized. The Age of Soma is upon us, and you will be a much more efficient leader because of it. Soon, we will be a nation of happy, smiling rebels.

Your admirer,Belacqua Jones

[i] This letter is a riff on an excellent article, “How Teenage Rebellion Has Become a Mental Illness” by Dr. Bruce E. Levine, which can be found at the above link. --cw

Saturday, February 2, 2008

According to a recent poll, 64% of Americans think your Iraq enterprise wasn’t worth it, to which the enlightened leader can only respond, “So what!”

The people who take these polls, and the people who believe they mean something, have no understanding of the synthetic realpolitik that drives our foreign policy. There is a fetid bubble of flatulence (How sweet the smell!) called The Beltway where corporomeisters pluck the world’s strings to create the discordant cries of the suffering that mark the march of civilization. The tune it plays is called “The Washington Consensus”, and the truth is that any country that refuses to dance to this tune will soon be crushed beneath the Invisible Hand of the Market, a relentless force so powerful that it exceeds even that of God and Allah.

The Beltway says we stay in Iraq because it is all about hubris. Hubris is an essential component of our foreign policy because hubris makes possible the moral atrophy that is so necessary to achieve and hold on to power. Hubris finds its justification in this power, a power that must constantly grow and expand for fear of the weakness that is seen as its only possible alternative. Morality is the millstone that keeps power earthbound. To soar, power must cut it loose.

What a joy it is to be freed of the pangs remorse that can rob one of sleep and well-being. To be able to contemplate a child’s death by starvation with nary a twinge of guilt is sublime. (Mind you, I said “contemplate”, not witness. Himmler planned death on a grand scale, but the only time he actually witnessed it, he puked all over his boots.)

The writer Arundhati Roy quotes Robert McNamara who said, “The question is, how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?” That pretty well explains everything. If evil is committed in the name of good, there is no good but only evil, which attaches itself like a parasite to the good that no longer is and in doing so becomes part and parcel of the illusionary good that was the justification for evil in the first place. Evil committed for the sake of evil pales beside that committed for the sake of good.

The ultimate good is economic development and growth. So good is this good that any evil committed to advance it is, by definition, good in that it rationalizes the death and destruction that must always accompany this development. You summed it up in 2006 when you said, “Iraq is no diversion; it is the place where civilization is taking a decisive stance against chaos and terror—and we must not waver.”

And “civilization”, as we all know, is a synonym for The Washington Consensus, and the broken bones and shattered bodies of the uncivilized are the fertilizer that facilitates its growth. This is what makes Iraq and Afghanistan so thrilling—they are the first of the Great Corporatist Wars of the twenty-first century.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Have you ever wondered what, exactly, constitutes a crime? Oh sure, there are laws on the books that designate certain activities as criminal, but your administration has shown us that the law need not be a burden. Why, then, is it that a given activity is criminal in one context, but perfectly legal in another context?

There is a common thread that runs through criminal activity that might help us answer this question. Crime is a greed-driven economic phenomenon. The aim of every crime is to generate a maximum profit through a minimum of activity. Why spend eight hours flipping burgers at McDonalds when one can make the same money snatching a well-heeled purse; why spend a lifetime toiling away at a mind-numbing white-collar job when one can make more money landing a government contract.

The difference between a purse snatcher and a CEO is that the CEO either pays taxes or has found numerous legal loopholes to evade them, and the purse snatcher neither pays taxes nor files them. And that, Big Guy, is the difference between legal and illegal criminal activity.

Why did Al Capone end up in jail: because they nailed him for tax evasion. Nonpayment of taxes is the ultimate crime against the State. This is why Wall Street gets a free pass while drug dealers are hounded and persecuted. Were the dealers to start paying taxes, the State would start to look upon them as capitalists instead of criminals.

Occasionally, a tax-paying entrepreneur in nailed, but that is usually when his activity is of a nature that could agitate the mob. Then you have populist prosecutors like Eliot Spitzer whose hobby is indicting business executives. But these are exceptions. As long as their money is either taxed or squirreled away in an off-shore tax haven, the State turns a blind eye on their activities.

And when they are prosecuted, the result is usually a six-figure fine which sounds like punishment to the proles, but it little more than chump change to the executive. This is because fines in this country are fixed dollar amounts that have little impact on the corporate bottom line. Fines will never draw blood until they are based on a hefty percentage of a corporation’s profits.

Some have suggested that the corporation is a modern-day mafia. This implies that were the mafia to start paying its taxes, it would be treated like a corporation. From a purely ethical point of view, there is little difference between running numbers or drugs and manufacturing cluster bombs. If you pay your taxes, you are a pillar of society; if you don’t, you are a criminal. The morality of your activity is a matter of complete indifference.

So, as you prepare your 2009 budget, think of the potential tax revenue that remains untouched. Once you are able to convince the drug cartels to pay their taxes, you’ll be able to save a fortune by declaring victory in the War on Drugs.

About Me

Case Wagenvoord's articles have been posted at "The Smirking Chimp", "Countercurrents" and "Dissident Voice". When he's not writing or brooding, he is carving hardwood bowls that have been displayed in galleries and shows across the country. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two cats.
His book, "Open Letters to George W. Bush" is available at Amazon.com.